Book Review - Classic #3 - The Count of Monte Cristo

Well, of course I loved it.  Have you read it?  It's fabulous.

My problem in writing a review is wondering what, if anything, matters.  Did Dumas write this for pure entertainment?   If that is the case, then the novel is an out of the ballpark success.  Drama, intrigue, suspense, revenge and subterfuge all craftily woven together that make every one of its twelve-hundred plus pages worth it.

However.

If this is supposed to be some great lesson in morality, particularly about the existence of God, the effects of vengeance or revenge, or even the great balance between justice and mercy, I think there could be some bones to pick.

Before I pick, I must admit to wondering if reading the book was even necessary.  I am a fan of the James Caviezal as Edmond Dantes movie version and for the first couple hundred pages, felt the few differences between the movie and book were inconsequential.   Of course, as is always the case, there were more details, more depth to the characters, but the set up was the same.  Edmond was a stand-up guy, engaged to his beautiful Mercedes and happy and lucky in love and life.  Then, jealous rivals and a situation of unfortunate coincidence remove him from his simple bliss and he spends the next fourteen years locked up for made-up crimes without any possibility of recourse or explanation.  It nearly drives him insane, until he meets a fellow prisoner who, mistakenly thinking he was digging a tunnel to escape, digs a tunnel between their own two cells.  As the passageway enables them to enjoy each other's company, the elder prisoner spends years passing on his vast knowledge to his eager student, eventually including information about a mammoth undiscovered treasure.    All that is left is for Edmond to find a way to escape, collect his treasure and decide what he wants to do with his freedom and fortune.

All of that happens as the movie explained it to me.  It is clever in the movie and just as clever in the book.  At this point of the story, however, the book becomes a maze of plot development compared to the movie's much simplified stroll-down-a-lighted-main-street approach.  I liked the maze.  I appreciated Dumas thinking I could handle the maze.  Because, let me tell you, it gets a little disorientating throughout the last eight-hundred pages, or so.

Now for the picking - I have heard that this is a great story about revenge.  Certainly, that is true.  It is a great story.   And it is about revenge.  What is unclear to me is if the revenge is great.  I don't think so.  I'm not sure we're supposed to think so.

Something that always bugged me about the movie was how Edmond, or The Count of Monte Cristo, got all of his revenge and then, when everyone was dead or ruined, he had a change of heart and could get back to the business of being a good guy.  Well......yeah!  When everything is going your way, being forgiving and kind and compassionate is not a very hard thing to be.

The book doesn't go quite as far in making everything hunky dory for Edmond in the end, as there are a few unforeseen consequences he didn't count on bothering him when he set out to ruin those who ruined him, but neither book nor movie bothers to really ask the question if Edmond had the right or responsibility to become the Count of Monte Cristo; if he could have received the peace he deserved without spending over a decade playing a covert, and, might I add, one-sided, game of chess.   Of course, had he taken his large fortune and settled into the quiet life of a fisherman, there wouldn't be much of a story:)

The other thing that make the story even more unlikely is that all of the original characters still seem to be connected.  Sons are marrying daughters, everyone lives in the same town, and everyone associates in the same class-level, which happens to correspond nicely with The Count's own unlimited wealth.   Again, I concede that without this set-up, the revenge would have taken even longer to enact.  Having everyone's story interact made the fall-out go down like an intricate design of dominoes.  It took a long time to set-up but once the inital push was made, everything came crashing down.


I'm so glad I read the book.  Instead of scratching my head about whether or not anyone, even someone grossly wronged by evildoers, has the right to seek vengeance, I will simply enjoy the time I spent learning about the unstable french government surrounding Napoleon's reign, the dazzling style that The Count of Monte Cristo infused into everything he did and, yes, some head scratching about who was who.   Here's help.